Patty CareyPatty Carey can’t imagine waking up and not being able to run.

In 1986, when she made a New Year’s resolution to start running, she meant it.

"I immediately got all hung up into it," Carey said. "Running became an obsession."

Through the cold, the heat, the wind and the rain, Carey ran. Never once did she say, "I’m not going to run today," she said.

She zipped through 10 mile runs at 8 minute clips without batting an eye and would enter road races both Saturday and Sunday most weekends, she said.

During that first year of running, Carey steadily increased her mileage and began eyeing marathons. She’s completed 19, including Houston (twice), New York (six times), Marine Corps (once in 3:41), Boston (twice), Pensacola Blue Angel (once), Gulf Coast (once), Mardi Gras (three times), Chicago (once in 3:38), and Las Vegas International twice, in 1999 and 2000, where she achieved her best consecutive times of 3:37:58 and 3:37:11.

Turns out, Las Vegas would be her last marathon. She scaled back her mileage in order to avoid injury -- she’s had shin splints and minor stress fractures but nothing serious, she says -- and to keep running for years to come, she said.

"I do miss running marathons," Carey said. "I can still remember the feeling crossing the finish for every single one ... it’s such an emotional feeling."

Carey said every marathon experience was positive. She was blessed with good weather on race days and at Boston, she ran right past Heartbreak Hill -- where some runners are reduced to a walking pace -- never breaking stride.

"I asked another runner, where is Heartbreak Hill, and he said, you past it several miles back," she said.

Carey rises each weekday morning at 4 to run. Three afternoons a week she hits the gym for weight training.

She has served as Chef Andrea Apuzzo’s bookeeper at his Metairie restaurant for 26 years. She said co-workers laugh because for 26 years, she has eaten the same breakfast of dry cereal, a bagel and a banana, at her desk.

"I’m a creature of habit," she said. "I can’t help myself."

Carey has remained single and childless through her 56 years although she does share her Old Jefferson home with six lively chihuahuas.

"I’ve been lucky," Carey said as she sequed into a funny story.

"A repair man from a local business came out to check my treadmill when it stopped working," she said. "He was shocked to find i had logged 7,132 miles on it."

"He said his company had never seen anything like that. He told me he usually sees clothes hanging from treadmills.